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102 was interested. Journalism, literature, oratory, for him were but means by which the people were aroused. His very anonymity made him a power, and from 1755 to the breaking out of the war, though he was the most industrious, the most effective and the most able of the men writing for the papers, he was the least identified. He seldom, if ever, published anything under his own name, but carried on, sometimes over periods of several years, controversies under different noms de plume. His biographer gives a list of twenty-five of these disguises that he assumed, among them: "An American," "A Tory," "A Son of Liberty," "An Elector in 1771," "Candidus," "Determinatus," "Populus," "Cedant Arma Togae," "Principiis Obsta," "A Religious Polltician," and "Shippen."

We have seen in the previous chapter how Adams began his fight for liberty by the formation of a club and, after its formation, by the publication of the Independent Advertiser. He was then a young man of twenty-six. When the paper failed, because of business difficulties, he was still very young—only twenty-eight. Between that time and the start of the Boston Gazette in 1755, he became a man of maturity, a statesman, a ripened combatant. During those five years he gathered about him the men who were to be famous as the group that defied England, brought about the Revolutionary War and inaugurated the movement that led to American independence.

In the columns of the Independent Advertiser was printed the sermon of Jonathan Mayhew, in which the distinguished Unitarian set forth the idea that these colonies should be not only free and independent, but should become a republic. This sermon has been called